Creedence Clearwater Revival vs the Grateful Dead vs the Band

do they have a bayou there?

Let's see, El Cerrito CA to Bayou St. John Louisiana = 2270 miles

Toronto to the bayou = 1310 miles

So Robbie Robertson has a legitimate claim to being "born somewhat closer to the bayou".

On the other hand, San Francisco to the mountains of the moon = 238,857 miles. Posers.

Don't forget that Robbie's mother was a Mohawk so he is the most American of all.

no one in the band was named virgil, nor did they go hungry in '65

poseurs

Levon was the most authentic person in any of these bands & garth hudson had the most authentic beard, so everyone vote for the band

One funny thing about Creedence that I just remembered is that I used to always see Cosmos Factory in the used bins and think it was some kind of dodgy compilation or weird italian pressing or something because of the goofy cover. Like my brain couldn't compute that that was the actual cover of their biggest album. I like it now though.

yeah, they should have gone with the original concept

http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj242/donaldparsley/cosmo2.jpg

check out the sex face on this fogerty

Electric Creedenceland

Someone's chooglin' John in that picture.

Someone needs to do a CCR compilation leaving out all the ubiquitous hits everyone knows and all the lousy cover tunes.

Here's a list with no hits, no covers (including bonus tracks, but no live stuff)

Creedence Clearwater Revival
The Working Man
Get Down Woman
Porterville
Gloomy
Walking on the Water
Call it Pretending

Bayou Country
Bootleg
Graveyard Train
Penthouse Pauper
Keep On Chooglin'

Green River
Commotion
Tombstone Shadow
Wrote a Song for Everyone
Cross-Tie Walker
Sinister Purpose
Broken Spoke Shuffle
Glory Be

Willy and the Poor Boys
It Came Out of the Sky
Poorboy Shuffle
Feelin' Blue
Don't Look Now
Side O' The Road
Effigy

Cosmo's Factory
Ramble Tamble

Pendulum
Pagan Baby
Sailor's Lament
Chameleon
(Wish I Could) Hideaway
Born to Move
Hey Tonight
It's Just a Thought
Molina
Rude Awakening #2

Mardi Gras
Lookin' For A Reason
Take It Like a Friend
Need Someone to Hold
Tearin' Up the Country
Someday Never Comes
What Are You Gonna Do
Sail Away
Door to Door
Sweet Hitch-Hiker

The contrast between Cosmo's (all hits & covers) vs Pendulum (no covers and only one hit) is pretty funny.

I really dig Porterville / Call it Pretending. Is the rest of the pre-creedence stuff worth hearing?

Hey Tonight wasn't a hit? Shoulda been. That's one of my favorite short CCR singles.

Oh maybe. It sounds familiar.

Sweet Hitch-Hiker too. (It was a hit, but it's not one of my favorites)

I guess it was included on TV's biggest selling album so who am I to argue?

Regarding the authenticity of Americana between these bands reminds me of the story of Robert Hunter's proudest moment as a lyricist: in the audience at a dead show during cumberland blues, he overheard someone loudly complaining about these rock bands making money off of old Appilacian folk songs.

I had heard that story as Hunter actually taking a trip to Western MD and playing the song for some old men there, one of whom said something to the effect of “that’s a great song, but I can’t imagine what the guy who wrote it must think of a band like the Grateful Dead playing it.”

I'm not a big Deadhead, but I voted Dead vs. Yes and Rush, and my kneejerk reaction was do so here too, simply based on the breadth of their career output, and thinking of CCR mainly in terms of their great run of singles. But wk's list of CCR deep cuts is mindboggling. I love so many of those songs! It got me wondering what sort of similar list-paring could be done for the Dead, as they played so many of their best-known songs to death in concert over the years.

If you went into Deadbase or similar, and tossed out all the covers, plus every song that was played more than x amount of times, you'd be left with a CD-R of "Cream Puff War," "Pride Of Cucamonga," "My Brother Esau" and the like; maybe worth a cursory listen, but no comparison to the CCR one.

Pagan Baby

^^^choogles like a motherfucker

If you went into Deadbase or similar, and tossed out all the covers, plus every song that was played more than x amount of times, you'd be left with a CD-R of "Cream Puff War," "Pride Of Cucamonga," "My Brother Esau" and the like; maybe worth a cursory listen, but no comparison to the CCR one.

That doesn't make any sense though because none of those songs are ubiquitous and inescapable like CCR's hits. The only songs you would maybe have to delete are Truckin', Casey Jones, and Touch of Grey. A similar list of Dead songs minus hits and covers would be ridiculously long. Even if you just did their first seven albums I think it would be a much bigger, better, and more diverse list.

And the Dead's covers are mostly of old traditional songs that aren't necessarily as well known. When I first listened to the Dead albums I didn't think "oh great a lame cover of New New Minglewood Blues-- SKIP" the same way that I did with CCR's covers of really well known pop songs.

I dunno when I hear the Dead butchering Buck Owens I definitely think SKIP

where does that happen?

q for indie nerds, be honest: how many of you knew "walking on the water" from the richard hell & the voidoids cover?

Would like to hear that.

xp

sorry was thinking of Merle Haggard

xp

sorry was thinking of Merle Haggard

where'd they do that?

Walking on the Water makes me thing "hey they sampled London Calling"

altho this claims they did do "Tiger by the Tail", "Sawmill" and "Slewfoot" don't think I ever actually heard those tho. I was thinking of "Mama Tried"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUgYOGX8XOM

so some live shit right? I skip all of that as a matter of course. They had enough trouble singing in the studio, I don't need to hear their live wailing. And live albums in general suck outside of jazz.

for me this is GD/Anthem/Aoxo/Workinman/AmBeaut vs. the 7 CCR albums

xp

"trouble singing" is putting it generously

Actually Jerry doesn't sound half bad in that video. They're no Everly Bros of course.

wk, for sure the Dead's "hits" aren't as ubiquitous as CCR's, but there are way more warhorse Dead songs than the three you mention. "Me And My Uncle," "Sugar Magnolia" and "Playing In The Band" were evidently their three most played songs. They're no "Bad Moon Rising" in terms of every bar and VFW band covering them, or every radio listener knowing them, but in the Dead canon they're huge. Add "Uncle John's Band," "Friend Of The Devil," even "The Other One" they played over 500 times. I was just trying to get past the songs they played the most to try to find a seldom-played cut that hit me as hard as the first time I heard "Tombstone Shadow." Maybe "It Must Have Been The Roses," as I just came to that one rather recently.

yeah, I see what you mean I just think it's a totally different thing. The only people who know which songs they played 500 times (cause they've seen them live or listened to boots) are already fans. I'm coming to CCR from the point of view that I know all their hits, and I've skimmed their albums a few times but never been able to get into them because apart from the hits nothing really stands out to me.

So you're talking about a list for a Dead fan to make it feel like the first time again, but the CCR list is more to convert a CCR skeptic (which I still am).

If I had to trim their non-hits/non-covers to a set of A-list classic material it would be this

Walking on the Water
Penthouse Pauper ("If I was ballplayer/wouldn't play no second string" line has a special bitterness to it)
Keep On Chooglin'
Tombstone Shadow
Wrote a Song for Everyone
Cross-Tie Walker
Sinister Purpose
Don't Look Now
Effigy
Ramble Tamble
Pagan Baby
(Wish I Could) Hideaway
Hey Tonight
Rude Awakening #2 (the most psychedelic thing they ever did)
Someday Never Comes
Sweet Hitch-Hiker

And maybe CCR played "Tombstone Shadow" at every gig, I have no idea. I honestly discovered it via Southern Culture on the Skids' cover.

be honest: how many of you knew "walking on the water" from the richard hell & the voidoids cover?
*raises hand*

wk, there are at least three songs left on your list that were hits - Hey Tonight, Sweet Hitch-Hiker and Someday Never Comes among them, plus several tracks that weren't released as singles but received heavy airplay - Ramble Tamble, for instance. And even some of what's left stands out - Walking On The Water (memorably covered by Richard Hell & the Voidoids) and the perennial favorite (Wish I Could) Hideaway. And even though the much-derided, end-of-the-road Mardi Gras features only three songs written / sung by John Fogerty, they're as good as anything he did before or since.

An amazing 51% of the 47 songs that John Fogerty wrote (or in one case, co-wrote) and sang for Creedence Clearwater Revival were either Top 40 hits somewhere in the world (20 of them!) or highly played FM radio hits (4 of them, which is probably an undercount on my part). In some cases, planned singles *weren't* released since the previous single was still riding high in the charts, theoretically robbing Fogerty of even more hits. And this doesn't include several more hits I'm not counting because they were covers! Something like 75% - 80% of these 47 songs are still well-remembered / played / covered today, which is pretty unusual since most big artists from that time period have a high proportion of "forgotten" hits.

Who matches this record? I don't think even the Beatles do (and their were *two* primary songwriters there, plus a few from George.) Maybe Dylan or the Velvet Underground, if one stretches the definition of hit to include songs frequently covered today. Fogerty's stuff still sounds great, fresh and exciting. Pretty freaking incredible, if you ask me. The sad thing is that among songwriters of his league almost no one was as tremendously robbed by their label as him.

Mo, these . . .

Long As I Can See The Light (double a-side single with Lookin' Out My Back Door - #2)
Hey Tonight (double a-side single with Have You Ever Seen The Rain? - #8)
Someday Never Comes (#25)
Sweet Hitch-Hiker (#6)

. . . were all hits. Those are the US chart positions. All of them except "Someday Never Comes" still get radio play here on Austin's oldies station.

Mind-boggling, the greatness of even the "filler," isn't it?

q for indie nerds, be honest: how many of you knew "walking on the water" from the richard hell & the voidoids cover?

for years i only knew "run through the jungle" as sung by lydia lunch

HAHA listening to that Lydia cover as I type!

occurs to me that the dead were the ICP of their era

Listening through shakey's list now and I think... this band is not for me. I just hear a huge gap in quality between their undeniable classics and the rest of the album tracks. He wrote these songs that have become massive standards, which the Grateful Dead obviously never did, and the Band has one or maybe two. But there's not a single album that I can sit all the way through. I'm not sure what it is.

As a pop songwriter, Fogerty is definitely up there with Lennon/McCartney, Dylan, Goffin/King, Smokey Robinson, Holland/Dozier/Holland, Bacharach/David etc. But as a rock band putting out albums at the peak of the album as a form, they don't really cut it for me.

Mo, these . . . were all hits.

Yeah I know and I debated quibbling, but they were just in the original list posted and I was just c+ping

yeah, sorry. I know my list probably wasn't accurate. I just threw it together quickly based on the songs I've already heard a million times to try to see what I was missing. Hey Tonight is the only other one I recognize though.

As a pop songwriter, Fogerty is definitely up there with Lennon/McCartney, Dylan, Goffin/King, Smokey Robinson, Holland/Dozier/Holland, Bacharach/David etc. But as a rock band putting out albums at the peak of the album as a form, they don't really cut it for me.

Yeah, it's interesting that - aside maybe from Cosmo's Factory - no one really ever talks about CCR albums. And to be honest, a weak point for me is their tendency to stretch it out on a song or two past the 5- or 6-minute mark. But considering that they released tons of material in a short time, and didn't sink to the level of doing "novelty" tunes, and Fogerty wrote 80% of their material by himself, I can sort of forgive him. I think in Springsteen's speech inducting them into the RRHOF, he talked about how Fogerty just got in there, said what he had to say, and split. The sort of economy in CCR's singles doesn't make for compelling album listening, especially when "deep" album cuts were often 7 minutes long - it makes the albums feel disjointed somehow, despite the fact that the songs all have a similar basic feel. I don't think the gap in quality is as big as you do - plenty of non-hits could have been hits - but yeah, they weren't really an album band.

The opposite is true of the Band, who never had a big hit as such, but whose first couple of albums are pretty perfect. I always got the feeling that later albums by them were searching for a hit, which lowered their power.

wk, I'd be curious how, if you listened to "Hey Tonight," you would compare it to their hits. To me, it's as a piece with them (and it was a hit), but clearly it's not one of the commonly played ones today. I ask because I'd love to get a sense of whether it's potentially familiarity with their hits that makes the other stuff seem lesser. Not just to you, but to other people. Give it a spin and let us know.